


Maybe

by christiant



Series: The Right, The Left, The Saint, and The Lady. [8]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 14:54:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1903215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/christiant/pseuds/christiant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>maybe she will</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe

Post end of apocalypse, it is not hard to get the world's leaders to remember the fallen, not when Miss Mori has lost her father and Beckett has lost his brother and the former Ranger now Marshall by default Hansen has lost his son. 

What _is_ hard, is making sure that Right gets her due. 

They (the other Rangers, her family, the world) only want to remember the Hero Girl, virtuous and brave and kind. 

They want to kill her after she's dead and Left will not allow it.

She goes on the radio, on the t.v., on any blog that will have her and demands justice for her co-pilot.

She avoids using the name because it'll hurt her, it'll undermine her message, it is impossible to feel righteous anger and sorrow at the same time.

She makes them honor the skinny funny girl who refused to get glasses or relax her hair. The open mouthed gum chewer with the long braids and the nylons and garters in eighty-seven degree heat. 

And it hits her, the worrying over numerous secret boyfriends and girlfriends and significant others who identified as neither, fearing that she wouldn't come back one night when no one knew where she was going but her. 

Lady D is a museum piece now, unlike during the days of war when she'd just been a well maintained scrap heap. She is pristine and well-oiled and she can feel heat coming from Her hands and the kick of machine guns and the push and pull of walking in sync. 

She sits in an air conditioned statue garden around hundreds of Rangers and technicians and a couple of other decommissioned Jaegers.

On her left there is an empty space for what's yet to come, but on the right there is her co-pilot immortalized in stone. Her friend, her sister, the skinny funny girl with the glasses, hip cocked and hair blowing like the breeze could move it.

She is winking, scrunching up her face like a USO girl the way that she was on the recruitment poster, mouth partially parted as she mouths the words to pose the infamous question that had killed a quarter of her garden compatriots. 

She is not in uniform like many of the others. She rests in the low riding jeans and cropped shirt and Latin hip tattoo ("nec temere nec timide") that were featured on the Barbie doll.

Her helmet sits on the ground by her feet. The dog tags are correctly inscribed as well, reading "Saint Jude/From Virginia With Love/si vales valeo" just like the originals do.  
But her hand reads " _deus ex machina_ ," an artists' touch that'd have made her laugh if she could see it.

And she hugs it even though the walls and columns tell her to keep her hands off the stone, pressing her forehead to Tai's forehead and running her finger over the rim of her glasses and the curve of her cheeks. 

Jeanie grabs at her own tags ("Lady Desperation/From Tai When The World Is Not Enough/Memento Vivere") and remembers that first drift when they'd slotted together expertly and both thrown up afterwards at the smell of chili when it lingered afterwards. 

Jeanie remembers being called Virginia by someone other than her Nonna Geraldine and her Aunt Coretta. 

Jeanie remembers the tingle of her fingers in her drivesuit and feeling Lady D's left move without prompting.

She can almost feel the body turn and snap the Kaiju's neck.

Blood is running down both of their noses and her heart is racing and Tai is vicious and unrelenting, her skinny funny girl is no longer the anime watching comic book geek she grew up with. She is fearless and wonderful and alive.

But when Jeanie comes back to the present Tai is gone. Tai is dead and gone and has been for more than seven years, but Jeanie is alive and for Tai's sake maybe she should just start acting like it. 

Follow her advice for once and remember to live.

Maybe.

**Author's Note:**

> Me and those James Bond references just won't quit.


End file.
